One of Europe’s leading proptech and iBuyer companies Kodit.io has announced the acquisition of Lucas, a Spanish-based rent-to-own startup, taking the company’s headcount to over 100 people across offices in Finland, Spain, and Poland. As part of the acquisition, Lucas will take on the management and expansion of Kodit.io’s business in Spain.
Kodit.io will now offer a unique service that allows homebuyers to rent before actually buying a home. They strategically combine their automated home selling and buying experience with Lucas’ rent-to-own product, which allows first-time homebuyers to choose a property with only a 5% down payment. Kodit.io comes up with the remaining 95% to buy the flat and lease it back to them with an exclusive option to buy on a future date at a predetermined price.
“Already 80% of the buyers on the Kodit.io platform are Millenials and majority of them, first-time home buyers. So adding a service that solves one of their major problems fits into our strategy perfectly,” said Kalle Salmi, CEO of Kodit.io. “With the current lending criteria, younger generations need 10–20 years to save up enough money to buy a home in most of the large cities in Europe. They are chasing a moving target with continuously increasing real estate prices. With also increasing rents it's like a vicious cycle that prevents people from getting the long term financial benefit of being a homeowner.”
Poor access to homeownership is a huge problem in Europe causing significant differences in the level of wealth and net worth between generations. With the acquisition, Kodit.io is now positioned to make first-time home-buying more equitable. The Lucas product will be an addition to the product stack to make the process more efficient by onboarding users and enabling the financial transactions to be made digitally.
“Homeownership has proven to be the largest wealth generator to reach a massive scale in the last century. However, it is almost impossible currently for first-time buyers to get into the housing ladder. Lucas’s core is to provide first time home buyers with an accessible and flexible solution into buying a home, driven by technology. Through our platform, we have been able to sign up over 15,000 future homebuyers in need of our service. It quickly became evident that Kalle and I shared a very similar mission and that we should just align into a single vision to create something that can lift many peoples’ future,” commented Steven Aitkenhead, CEO and founder of Lucas.
